Technology Futures

Amazon is offering an eBook. Dozens of companies lost their shirts with ebooks in the late nineties. Back then, laptops were expensive and PDAs had tiny screens and were hard to read (Apple's Newton was the exception). So many thought that ebooks--light, portable readers--would catch on. But the number of titles available for any given platform were limited, and too many manufacturers opted for proprietary book formats that made publishing a nightmare. A successful book might have to be made available in several different formats. At least one company (I can't remember the name) had the good sense to adopt PDF as the file format, but nonetheless, ebooks never really caught on.

File formats were just part of the problem. There was also digital rights management, the mechanics of buying, downloading, and installling the files was another, battery life was yet another issue, finally, some were awkward to use. It's hard to beat books, which have had hundreds of years of design packed into the format.

Amazon's design has a keyboard (for taking notes, which was usually impossible with earlier ebook systems), probably uses e-ink, which extends battery life, and comes with EVDO wireless, meaning you can download books easily and probably also does email and other common chores.

It will be interesting to see how this does. If Amazon can afford to play the "give away the razor, make money on the blades" game and sell it cheap with the hope of making it up on book sales, it could catch on--if the books are cheap enough.

Despite the popularity of online music sites like iTunes, music prices did not come down any because music publishing houses were and still are greedy--they want all the money they used to make on CD sales, but they no longer have any distribution costs. If book publishers take the same route, Amazon may have tough sledding. And if it is hard for authors and publishers to prepare a manuscript for the ebook, it may be even worse.

Having said all that, I think ebooks are inevitable. A lot of books are read once and discarded, and many technical books have time sensitive material that becomes less useful in just a year or two. And the high cost of college textbooks could be brought down with cheap ebooks. So we will have ebooks; what is uncertain is what platform we will read them on. Most of us don't want both a laptop and a second ebook "thing." We'd rather have a single device that serves as both, and a tablet computer would do nicely.

I am constantly surprised at the number of corporate phone systems that ask you to enter your account number, and then as soon as you get a human (if you get a human), they ask you to enter the very same number again.

I called Marriott to make a hotel reservation, and was pleasantly surprised. I entered my frequent traveler number, and was taken to a real live human almost immediately, who greeted me by name; the system transferred the call and put my customer information up on the screen for the agent. That's the way IT is supposed to work. Marriott's IT department is doing its job--not something you can say about a lot of other companies.

Henrico County, Virginia, has garnered national attention for its program of giving laptops to kids once they reach sixth grade. But if the school system is not prepared to truly transform the teaching and learning process, the results may not be what we expect. In this article, at least one mother made her daughter give the laptop back because it had become a time waster for the girl and her grades had dropped.

It is easy to blame it on kids spending too much time chatting and goofing off on online Web sites, but those are only symptoms of the real problem. I can take some of the blame for all this, as the Blacksburg Electronic Village project helped our county schools become the first school system in the country to have broadband to every school and to become the first school system in the country to have broadband in every classroom. Since then I have worked on many other K12 technology projects--all with the best of intentions, but the results have been mixed at best.

Teaching kids is a complext process that requires years of experience, and you can't just drop a few computers into the middle of a centuries old way of doing things and expect magical results. I have learned that the hard way. In my experience, it is school administrators that are most often at fault. They are eager to win grants and push technology into the classroom; it looks good to parents and to elected leaders that decide school budgets.

But those same administrators are often much less enthusiastic about actually rolling up their sleeves, working side by side with teachers, and trying to figure out what changes need to be made to really leverage the promise of all this technology. And there is what I call the "five percent problem." Dump a bunch of technology into a school, and under any circumstances, you will have about five percent of teachers who are motivated to dig in and do amazing things with the stuff. Those "five percent" projects become the poster children for technology in the classroom. They are used to say, "See what great stuff all this is!"

But those five percenters are the exception, not the rule. Most teachers need a lot of help and support from the top down to get comparable results, and it usually is not there. So while computer manufacturers make money selling computers to schools, our kids are still learning the same old way. If your school district wants money for technology efforts, ask some hard questions about how administrators intend to support teachers with good tech support, appropriate learning resources, and assistance with curriculum changes.

This article demonstrates how easy it is for others to snoop around in your personal affairs if you like to use "free" services like Google Calendar. The author, simply by clicking on calendar items and using the information to dig up additional detail, was quickly able to identify where a woman lived and when she would be out of the house (handy for burglars).

Google Calendar has a privacy setting, but not everyone uses it. Sharing a calendar with your friends and family often has the unintended side effect of sharing it with everyone else in the world. Use these services carefully, and never, ever let your children use these.